Claire Liu beat Alex Eala 6-3, 6-0 in the final of the Prudential Hong Kong Tennis Open on Sunday, November 8, at the Victoria Park Tennis Stadium. It is the American’s first WTA Tour title. For Eala, it was the last match of her 2026 season. She had played the last five games of the first set and all of the second with heavy strapping on her right thigh and knee.

When the WTA rankings come out on Monday, November 9, Eala will be world No. 15. That is the highest ranking of her career and of any Filipino player in the tour’s history.

Nine Straight Games

Eala made the better start. She broke Liu to love early and led 2-1. Liu then broke back and took a 3-2 lead, and Eala held to level at 3-3.

After that game Eala called the trainer for a medical timeout and had her right thigh and knee taped. She was cleared to keep playing, and she didn’t win another game. Liu broke her in the eighth game and served out the set 6-3. In the second set she broke three times. She closed out the title on her first championship point, winning the last nine games of the match.

Nobody has said yet what the injury is. Eala had played more than five hours of tennis on Friday and Saturday to get to the final. She beat Croatia’s Antonia Ruzic 7-6(7), 7-5 in a rain-delayed quarterfinal, then beat Greece’s Maria Sakkari 7-5, 3-6, 6-4 in a semifinal that rain stopped several times and that ran two hours and 43 minutes. Our preview of the final covered both matches.

“It Changed My Life”

At the trophy ceremony, Eala spoke to Liu first. “A great week and a great match. Very, very well-deserved. Congratulations!” she said. Then she turned to the crowd. “Wrapping up this year, you guys do not know how much meaning you add on top of, you know, what I do, and how much of a pleasure it is to go about my life sharing these moments with you all. So I am forever grateful.”

She thanked her parents, her brother Miko, her coach Joan Bosch and the rest of her coaching team, and she was crying by the time she got to the season. “The season has just… it changed my life,” she said. “It changed my life for the better, sorry.”

“I am incredibly proud of the work we put in this year,” she told her team. “We are the only ones who truly know what it took to arrive to this point in our journey. So, thank you so, so much. Congratulations! This is only the beginning. And this one, like all of them, is ours. So congratulations.” The crowd applauded, and Bosch answered with a heart sign.

Liu, 2-0

Liu is 26 and was ranked No. 102 when the week started. She won the Wimbledon girls’ title in 2017 and got as high as No. 52 in January 2023. Before this week she had played one tour-level final, at Rabat in 2022, and lost it to Martina Trevisan. In Hong Kong she won five matches without dropping a set. Her wins included eighth seed Katie Boulter, Turkey’s Zeynep Sönmez and qualifier Alexandra Shubladze, and she is projected to climb into the top 70.

She now leads the head-to-head 2-0. Their first meeting was in the round of 32 at the Guangzhou Open on October 21, 2025. Liu, then ranked No. 305 and playing through qualifying, came from a set down to win 2-6, 6-4, 6-4.

This was Eala’s third tour-level final, and she has won one of them. She lost to Maya Joint at Eastbourne in 2025 after holding four match points. In August she beat Jessica Pegula to win the Mubadala DC Open in Washington, the first WTA singles title by a player from the Philippines.

What Monday Brings

Getting to the final had already locked in No. 15. Reaching the semifinals moved Eala past Naomi Osaka in the live rankings. Beating Sakkari took her to 2,392 points, which moved her past Romania’s Sorana Cirstea, and nobody ranked below her could catch up. A title would have added 87 more points, but she still would have been No. 15, because No. 14 Elise Mertens has 2,540.

She came to Hong Kong at No. 17, a career high she had reached the Monday before. She started 2026 at No. 53. In Hong Kong she won four matches and lost one, which leaves her season at 40-25 in tour-level matches. Before this year she had won 15 tour-level matches in her whole career.

The week also changed how her Asian swing reads. Before Hong Kong she had lost in the first round in Wuhan, in the round of 16 in Singapore and in Ningbo, and in the quarterfinals in Tokyo to Diana Shnaider, the player who went on to win that tournament. A year ago in Hong Kong, she lost in the round of 16 to Victoria Mboko.

Next: Janice Tjen at the Philippine Arena

Her next match is at home. On Tuesday, December 8, she plays Indonesia’s Janice Tjen in Alex Eala Live: Game. Set. Celebrate, an exhibition organized by Tatler Philippines at the Philippine Arena in Ciudad de Victoria, Bulacan. The arena has been set up for more than 52,000 people. If it fills, the crowd would break the attendance record for a tennis match, which Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal set in South Africa.

Tjen and Eala know each other well. They reached the doubles semifinals as partners at the Abu Dhabi Open in February. As opponents, Tjen beat Eala 6-4, 6-1 in the quarterfinals of the SP Open in São Paulo in 2025. This year, Tjen asked the WTA for the same exemption Eala’s federation sought so they could play the Asian Games instead of the China Open. Hers was refused, and she played Beijing.

Gates open at 10:30 a.m. Junior players from the Philippine Tennis Association (PHILTA) play at 1:45 p.m. A celebrity doubles match follows at 2:20 p.m., with stars including Manny Pacquiao and Anne Curtis each paired with a professional. Eala and Tjen play at 3 p.m. The night before, December 7, there is a gala dinner with an appearance by Eala and a charity auction.

Tickets are sold through TicketWorld. They start at ₱600. Courtside floor seats in VVIP cost ₱25,750, and the top tier, Platinum, costs ₱63,705.50 and includes the gala dinner. The prices have drawn complaints online, and there have been reports of slow sales. Organizers say all merchandise proceeds will go to the Philippine Tennis Grassroots Program.

Then 2027

Eala has said she will start next season at the ASB Classic in Auckland, New Zealand, from January 4 to 10, and then go to the Australian Open. The Philippine Women’s Open, the WTA 125 event in Manila where she reached the quarterfinals in January, is on the calendar again in January 2027. She hasn’t confirmed she will play it. Later in the year, Manila gets its first WTA 250, the Manila Open, from November 1 to 7, 2027, as the last stop of the Asian swing. We wrote about what those dates could mean for her in our Wuhan preview. Every ElysPlanet story on her is in the Alex Eala archive.